Hackathon 2011 / EuroBSDCon wrap up

October 20, 2011By Chris Buechler

Thanks to many of you who contributed to our hackathon fund. It was a great success. We had 6 developers together here in Louisville. The primary areas of focus were 2.1 development, in the following areas.

Moving packages to PBIs - the package system in 2.1 will switch to using the PBI package system, originally from PC-BSD, though also used by some on stock FreeBSD installs. The benefit of using PBIs is each package has all its dependencies included in the package, which eliminates the dependency messes that can happen currently, such as one package requiring a certain version of a dependent package but another requiring a different version, uninstallation of one package stomping on another package by uninstalling a dependency it requires, uninstallation of a package breaking the base system by deleting things it uses (though we already work around that one automatically), easing clean uninstall of packages, amongst other benefits. This will be a great improvement in the package system for 2.1.

Updating to FreeBSD 9 - all of our patches are now up to date for FreeBSD 9, which will be the base OS for 2.1. We’ve also been working on minimizing the number of patches we have by getting things merged into FreeBSD where possible, as considerable efforts go into maintaining this, but we still have a significant patch set.

Documentation updates - a variety of updates on doc.pfsense.org.

General 2.1 release planning

Logging update for wireless - now goes into its own log since it’s noisy.

Work on Unbound as a replacement for dnsmasq, the underlying service used for the DNS forwarder.

And some minor other things I’m not remembering offhand. Thanks to our contributors for making this possible.

We were also at EuroBSDCon this month, presenting a full day training session on pfSense 2.0, which was the most popular tutorial at the conference with more than 50 people registered. It went great and was well received, though ran a bit long so we had to hurry at the end. A few pictures from the event were uploaded by Chris Horn, a friend of the project. That material will be refined and extended some to make it two full days, and offered again later this year. Keep an eye out here for info, and/or subscribe to our announcements list.

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